We’ve written about Dana Gavanski numerous times over the years, most recently back in 2022 with the release of album When It Comes on Full Time Hobby. An album “more unguarded and ambitious than its predecessors,” as we put it in a preview of single ‘Indigo Highway’, before describing how songs like ‘I Kiss The Night‘ underscored the Vancouver-born, London-based artist’s “commitment to sitting with vulnerability on [the record], practising an instinctive and honest examination which roots itself in the voice.”
This spring sees Dana Gavanski return with LATE SLAP, a brand new record on Full Time Hobby born of a newfound experimentality. Using Logic for the first time allowed Gavanski to work in ways previously out of reach, opening up new avenues of playfulness and invention to bring to life the full spectrum of contradictory moods which make up any person, and thus explore the sheer strangeness of being alive more fully. “This album is my take on the tension between cynicism/despair and openness/trust,” Gavanski explains. “It’s about tenderness in a world that’s constantly trying to desensitize us.”
Latest single ‘Ears Were Growing’ typifies the record’s ambiguity. A track at once buoyant, whimsical and deceptively dark which straddles a variety of competing wishes. Dreams of escaping one’s surroundings are presented in all their contradictory nature, the allure of change both thrilling and tormenting as the realisation of being stuck in reality dawns. But running counter to this frustration is a certain relief too, the sense familiarity carries its own comforts, no matter how dull or despairing that familiarity might be.
